Tag Archives: High visibility cataloguing

Yesterday I attended an all day library social media workshop, and came away enthused, encouraged and full of inspiration. We looked at perceived barriers to using social media, creating good content, mapping tools to tasks, and digital signage. There were plenty of break out sessions, and group discussions and activities, and a chance to reflect on what we were already doing and what we would like to do in the future. At the end of the day we all had to make a pledge to ‘do something new’ in the next few months, we wrote it down on a yellow sticky, and we will be chased to see that we have done what we pledged!

My pledge involved a new blog that I am setting up for the cataloguing department Iwork in. There will be five of us contributing to it, but three of these have never blogged before. I set up the bare bones of the blog just before I went on my Christmas break, so the next few months will see me (and the rest of the team) getting to grips with it; and starting to publicise it. Our target audience will be the staff and students of the University, although anyone else is welcome to read it! We will be promoting interesting books that pass through our hands, giving highlights on aspects of our job, explaining the vagaries of classification schemes, linking books to lecturers, and anything else we can think of. Basically trying to be high visibility cataloguers!

During yesterday’s workshop in the final session when we were discussing our pledges, one of my library colleagues informed me that she had a much better understanding of the pressures and problems we experienced in the cataloguing department because of following myself and another of our cataloguers on twitter (and reading our blogs); for instance she hadn’t heard of RDA before we started talking about it (and I wouldn’t have expected her to either). This means that when she has a pile of donations towering above her desk, and we aren’t doing them, she at least has some understanding of why. These comments only further encouraged me to get on with the blog, and to think seriously of getting a twitter account for the department too. We might not get hundreds of followers, but hopefully we’ll be spreading information to the right people.

It will be a few weeks before we really get going, but for future reference please check out our cataloguing blog and give us some feedback.